The Five College Consortium is building a new library annex in western Massachusetts.
A 35,000 square-foot building that will hold up to 2.5 million books is under construction just off I-91 in Hatfield.
It will store infrequently circulated materials from the college library collections of Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith and UMass.
Five College Consortium executive director Neal Abraham said the building will be climate controlled to preserve the single copies of rarely read books.
"This will get us at least 300 years of viability for acid-free paper, so this is suitable for the kind of long term preservation we are interested in," said Abraham.
The new library annex is expected to be finished in May.
